EVE General Discussion

Lot's of good points raised, but mostly relating to null sec warfare.

All I can comment on from personal experience is high sec wardec wars, been in more than a few.

Off-grid boosters don't bother me near as much as neutral boosters. Big advantage for the larger "pro" wardec corp vs the little guy, and they already have a usually huge advantage in manpower, resources and experience.

Neutral reppers should go criminal, not suspect, as this is again a big advantage to the larger corps vs the smaller limited respource/manpower corps. Really just eliminate it altogether via concord or whatever. BIG, unfair advantage to an entity that already has the advantage.

Not a null vs highsec issue, just my personal observations.

Wanna make out?

"Little guys" would feel a lot more empowered if they would let logic instead of emotions dictate their grander actions, and they would keep to the scale at which they can be successfull. It takes experience to determine the ideal scale, but with some dilligence and proper preparation you can punch above your weight, and strike pretty hard at that. Everything has it's limits, it's just a matter of finding out where they lie. And not giving in to apathy when you happen to cross them. and get a fleet welped.

Furthermore, large groups are often bureaucratic, making them predictable. That makes these groups easy to goad into actions that make it look like they are your ally, even when they are not. This principle can be (ab)used to put pressure on entities your own size. Social engineering goes a long, long, looooong way achieving objectives that would be out of your reach using brute force.

What brought me to participate on these forums was fundamentally a complaint :) the ESS exploit of placing it in anomalies, thus making ESS pretty much not a target for solo play, despite the fact that they were obviously designed with opening up raiding options for smaller groups, as well as siphons being kind of useless at the moment with the way they are setup and the impression that they have been nerfed by the large blocks lobbyists before being added to the game (not mentioning the API based pinpointing...).

I started this game wanting to be a bounty hunter, and that was way before the last changes in that area, and still to this day bounty hunting mechanics, if improved, are not up to par yet with what a newcomer can expect from the general cultural norms about this subject. Older players use it as a ISK ranking board ...

Playing solo, or with small group can be done and generate enough fun to stick to the game. It is frustrating though to see that the things that could make soloing even more engaging are being lobbyed down.

CCP realizes (see my sig link) that they have there a potential gaming crowd who has needs that are different from the larger groups, blobs, and powers... Better supporting Solo and small group is the first step to help newcomers that choose this approach to get in the game and carve their niches, and for me the game system should encourage this by having them target these established carebearing power groups, forcing them to actively defend their assets, rather than passively sitting on their collectives arses and letting the game system defend those for them..

Burner missions are a great addition to the PvE game for small goups, and the NPCs have obviously been unable to lobby CCP down from sending their most valued pilots in dangerous places . I wish CCP had the same approach on the larger players' power groups...

Which brings me back to my original complaint that the ESS in anomalies is a proof in my opinion that there is not enough lobbying in favor of solo or small groups, and too much in favor of the larger entities... and these forums are the only way to point this, by complaining about it...

Null should be conducive to change. The current null landscape is not. Furthermore, while large alliances and coalitions should indeed dominate more space, they shouldn't dominate all of it. In our own universe, powerful nations control lots of land - but smaller nations still exist and maintain sovereignty. In EVE, null should be open to everybody who is dedicated to claiming their own space - this isn't to say it should be open equally to all parties.

Groups should be able to control as much space as they are able to effectively police and utilize, to the extent which they are able to police and utilize it. For a small corp, this might be a system. For a coalition, it could be a region or two. Getting rid of sovereignty mechanics would be a good start. Renting would still be possible, but only if the coalition actually dedicated resources to enforcing their de facto hold over the area.

This has actually been a fruitful discussion and an interesting one, which is pretty rare for GD.

With regards to "empowerment", I do see myself agreeing with the general principle that the OP is putting forth.

It would be nice to see some kind of mechanic that makes guerrilla warfare something that smaller groups can use to harass and perturb larger groups, with the hope that the larger entity will just leave because it's just not worth the struggle of dealing with said guerrillas. However, it may be impossible to implement something like this without falling victim to a variant of Malcanis' Law - that is, that anything that attempts to bolster a small group will just bolster a larger group even more.

So perhaps that isn't the direction EVE should go. Maybe all that can be done for little guy empowerment has been done.

I read a few weeks ago some interesting points made by a member of one of the large alliances (maybe it was baltec1?) who listed some illuminating statistics on how many people can do PvE activities in one single system without losing profitability. As such, alliances with large amounts of people need large amounts of good, high-quality space to do activities in.

If alliances have the ability to improve space and have a region's worth of PvE potential within a constellation, and if these improvements require more caution and stewardship to maintain, perhaps this will cause alliances to condense - all their needs could be met in a smaller number of systems, and would require more attention to maintain properly. Then, hopefully, holes would develop and allow smaller entities to fill in the gaps.

Then, of course, some new conflict driver would need to be introduced. Maybe instead of the static moon mining system that currently exists, a more dynamic system could be introduced in which the T2 resources need to be prospected, exploited, and can run dry, but respawn - but not too quickly, of course.

This would need a rework of POS and Corp mechanics as well, but I hear those are in the works already, so yay.

Anyway, this post was a lot longer than I intended it to be, and I hope it makes some semblance of sense - it's quite late and I should have been in bed an hour ago.

Partial agreement here. Sec status loss is the least of the little guys issues. Really, the punishment is not that you have to rat or farm a clone tag or two, that's exactly why a smaller entity would like to police an area. They mainly get punished for trying to control a space asset or two, getting their fleet welped by a de facto bloc that proceeds to ninja the asset in question. This behaviour is predictable up to a level where little guys like us shoot something, let the blob descend on it, and then coerce the owners into giving up their other stuff, as the bloc in question doesn't actually create timers. It just cuts content short in order to grow even fatter, moving as few muscles as possible. Net result: it requires social engineering to achieve objectives, instead of fleeting up to kill stuff. That's a sad state of affairs for a game that's mainly about spaceship PVP. The status quo that it is not worthwhile to undock and attend the conquest game, sucks massive monkeyballs but I don't miss it enough to sell out to a bloc.

I agree with the principle you can only hold what you can defend. That principle favours the large group though. It's a double edged sword I find hard to offer a solution for. Perhaps looking into lowsec's mechanics is the solution indeed. Wiser people then me would have to take a look at that.

o/ "Social" skills represent

So why start it in the first place?

I do not oppose it ... but there is nothing that can be done.

Even if CCP finds a way to throw people a bone ...
... there will come new people who will whine about it the same way.

The issue isn't that people are powerless ...
... the issue is that people do not respect the laws of nature ...
... and that the game works, because of them.

I will applaud anyone who can come up with something ...
... that makes less people able to properly compete with more people ...
... without the less people having to put too much thought into it.

And that's the real issue. People want something, without knowing why they can't have it.
They don't care. For them it's just "a game", which shows their disconnectedness from it.

Laws of Nature apply to all sizes of groups. Small groups can annoy bigger groups,
but they can not push them away. It's not doable, no matter what.

CCP can not do anything about it. All they can do is make people *perceive* that there
is something they *could* do ... but in the end, there is nothing they *can* do.


Ten thousand goons just shrug it off.

I'm glad you started it.
You seem to be a good person. :)

This thread deserves a sexy post ...